Thanks to @primarybs on Twitter for the idea for this blogpost.

When you start using social networking sites it’s a good idea to link up the things you post so that the various groups of people who follow you all receive the same information, and you spread your news as far as possible.

Status updates
You can set up Facebook to automatically update your Twitter status using a third party applications, there are different ones available (try searching Facebook or look through the help pages). If you don’t want to use third party apps then simply copy and paste your Tweet into your Facebook status update window on the home page when you log-in.

Blog to Twitter to Facebook
When you write a blogpost browse the specific page on your blog to find the specific web link for your article. (Click the title and it will usually be displayed in  your browser on it’s own page with the link in the address bar of the browser.) Post this link using Twitter to promote your blog. If the link is long try using a shortening service like www.Tinyurl.com or www.bit.ly so it fits the Twitter character limit. You can also post your links on your Facebook page using your wall or on your Facebook Fan page wall. Once you have updated your status or fan page the news will appear on the home page of all the people you are friends with or who are fans of your page.

There is also code that you can use to include a Twitter feed on your website or blog. This code fetches and displays your tweets so that they can be seen by visitors to your website or blog without them needing to visit the Twitter site at all. (If you would like some code to do this please contact Create Design Studio on 01962 737989.)

Share your photos using Facebook photo galleries and Twitter
When you create a Facebook photo gallery you can share the gallery, even with those who don’t use Facebook. Click on the ‘Edit photos’ link when in your photo page and at the bottom of the page you will see a link that you can paste into Twitter, or use on your blog, to share your gallery with your followers. This is great for photos of your office, your products or to show photos from events you have attended.

Ecademy to Twitter
Parts of your Ecademy profile can be posted on Twitter, use the button next to the ‘likes’ link at the top of your profile page to give the Ecademy website permission to acess your Twitter account. If you don’t want to formally link the accounts together you can simply post the weblink  to your Ecademy profile page using your Twitter account.

Don’t forget to promote your social networking by conventional means
Use your email signature to promote your Twitter profile and your Facebook page by adding links to them. Your can also mention your presence on your business card, letterhead, promotional leaflets and on your invoices.

Create Design Studio: 01962 737989

This fresh and classy website was designed for Lifestyle Manager Joan who can help you with all those everyday tasks that prevent you from doing what you really want to do.

We were able to get together with Joan and discuss the kind of style she wanted for her website and enable her to update it herself by putting the design into WordPress. Now Joan can blog to her website visitors about the kind of tasks she can help them with whenever it suits her. If you would like to visit the website please click here.

A common mistake that many business owners make is to pigeon hole their website under IT. In actual fact designing a successful and profitable website has very little to do with IT,  today web design is about good old sales and marketing, IT just makes a website run NOT sell.

Learn to think of your website as more than just code and make the most of the potential of the web to find customers and make sales.

Is your website working effectively to grow your business?

A great website is like a salesman working 24/7 on your company’s behalf: always providing information and reassurance to customers who are looking for goods or services. Making your website more effective means:

• helping visitors to find you easily,
• getting visitors to stay longer once they arrive,
• making visitors more likely to initiate contact or leave their details with you,
• and, reassuring visitors to make them more likely to buy from you

Finding your site:
Search engine optimisation means using keywords, meta tags and including appropriate text on your site pages to enable searches to identify your website as a good match. Use Google Analytics to find information on what customers are really looking at on your site and to identify pages that are working well and ones that aren’t. Always promote your site in any way you can. Use online directories, referrals and reciprocal links to publicise it and add your URL to social networking profiles or business networking websites to increase your chances of being found.

Getting visitors to stay:
is all about relevant, interesting and useful content on your website, for driving sales nothing beats finding exactly what you are looking for online. Try to understand what motivates your customers to buy your product or service and orientate your content towards it. If your site is easy to use well designed and has great content it will encourage longer visits as people browse the pages. Try to use appropriate imagery to represent what you do and the kind of customers who buy from you so that visitors can feel that they ‘belong’. Get a neutral third party to test drive your site and tell you if it is easy to use and easy to find your contact details and easy to make a purchase. This exercise often reveals problems we would not spot on our own.

Get in touch:
Provide articles and newsletters in exchange for email addresses so you can contact visitors who are already interested in your site and contact them with relevant information on a regular basis. Make sure your contact details are clear and concise and easy to find on every page so that visitors can call, email or fill out a form to make contact, include your Twitter or social networking details so that visitors can make contact in a way that suits them.

By demonstrating your skills and expertise and providing plenty of relevant information on your service or product, orientated towards what your customers want and keeping in touch with them you are giving yourself the best chance to make sales from your website.

Keep in touch with your customers and benefit your business by generating more enquiries and leads to get more sales

Email-newsletters allow you to keep in touch regularly and cheaply with your customers. Publicise company news, useful information and details of your services straight to interested customers. A newsletter to customers puts your contact details into their in-box regularly and builds confidence in your abilities. By keeping in regular contact with your customers you can receive prompt feedback on your offers and gauge which ones will be successful in future.

Show your clients what you can do for them using a blog

Blogs are websites that you can update yourself by writing your own articles. Visitors can post comments back and ask questions, so a blog is a truly interactive website.

The software is free and it functions like a content managed website so you can amend your articles or add to them when you like. Update your technical information, product ranges or services and publicise company news and events quickly and easily.

Blogs are great if you are an expert because you can build up a comprehensive collection of your knowledge online, share it with others and get feedback or share ideas with your readers. You may have picked up ideas, expertise and ways of working that you could share with others. Your customers may want to know that you are an expert before they will buy.

A lot of our clients use them for business blogging, building up confidence in their readers that helps them to make contact and eventually make a purchase.

Don’t forget old fashioned promotion of your website, newsletter and your blog

Using your business cards, stationery, invoices, brochures and flyers. When you are networking, direct marketing and attending exhibitions ensure your URLs are at customer’s fingertips. Direct marketing will drive customers to your sites where you can give them more information to help them decide to buy.

Social networking isn’t just for students, use it to promote your online activities

Whenever you update your website, write a newsletter or post a blog article promote it on Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook and any other social networking or business networking sites you belong to and help people to find quality content online.

Think connections and always try to direct people towards helpful, useful or interesting content on your website, blog or newsletter.

Create Design Studio can help you to plan your website, design your website and build the pages. Call David Woodroofe and Charlotte Lamb on 01962 737989.

Our new printed newsletter “The Bulletin” is just about to be posted out to our customers. It has a mixture of articles about Create Design Studio, our projects and an article about using Social Networking to benefit your business.

The Create Design Studio Bulletin

If you would like to receive a copy of the newsletter please email us (studio@createdesignstudio.co.uk) with your address and we’ll mail you one too!

Come and visit us on the MBG stand where we will have some of these liitle gems for those of you who sign up to receive our e-newsletter.

Mmmm, tasty cakes!

Come on, you know you want one!

The Expo is at The Lights Theatre in Andover from 10am to 5pm on March 17th. Visit their website.

It is now taken for granted that an organisation will have a web presence of some kind. Even if this is simply a single web page with information and contact details, however, your website can do more than act as a virtual business-card. Because it is available 24/7, and increasingly on the move via smart-phones, your website could be seen by potential customers day or night and in almost any place around the world. Your website can act as an salesman for your products or services at any time and in any place.

Researching your customers can help you to work out what your website should look like and what information or functions it should have. When you understand what your customers want and need to give them confidence in your organisation it will help your website planning. Once you design and plan your website to fulfil their needs and to suit the way they want to buy the chances of them making personal contact or making a purchase are increased.

Identifying who your customers is important because once you know who they are and what they will be looking for on your website it becomes easier to:

• write the text on each page with them in mind,
• organise the pages so they can find what they need,
• include e-commerce or other website functions that they find useful.

Consider your products or services from the perspective of your customers, what do they need to know before they can buy from you? This can be difficult to put your finger on so try asking some of your existing customers why they buy from you. It’s an opportunity to find out why people buy from you that could really help your website plan. Identifying the benefit your particular products or service offers to your customers is the key to communicating that benefit to all the visitors to your website to increase sales.

It can also help to think about how your website visitors will access your website, are they likely to be at a desktop machine with plenty of time to browse your pictures and words, or are they likely to be using a smartphone with a small screen, possibly between meetings? If your customers are pushed for time they may not read all your text or appreciate scrolling through lots of images, although they may also know what they are looking for and will need specific navigation to specific pages to speed up the process. Customers at home may have more time to spend reading your pages and you can take this opportunity to include detailed specs and photographs.

If you have used the web to make purchases and to find information analyse what made you use the websites you chose to do business with. Where there useful features on the website you used? Perhaps there was a convenient way to pay. All of this research can be used to help plan your own website.

If you are selling products online it can is a good idea to make your site look as much like a shop as possible to help visitors know that you sell from the website. Include symbols to show what payment types you accept and make sure you have clear photographs and good descriptive text for each item. Make it obvious that this is a place to buy from.

Your customers need to understand how your website works, find it easy and convenient to use and it must suit their particular style of buying if they are to purchase from you rather than going to another website. That’s why it pays to understand your customer before you plan your website.

If you are planning an e-commerce website this topic is covered in-depth in the FREE Create Design Studio e-newsletter, sign up to receive it on our homepage.

Sign-up using our home page to receive your free copy of our information packed e-newsletter. This month Managing Director David Woodroofe guides you through planning your own e-commerce website and give you all the top tips from Create Design Studio about selling your products online.

This article was written for the Networking group MBG  for their February 2010 newsletter.

Typical Twitter Page

1. The Page Background
You can set the background design and colour of your page by clicking on the ‘Settings’ menu tab (at the top right of the page) and then click the ‘Design’ menu tab on the page that appears. You can also design your own background or take a photograph and place it on your profile background. The background could display your photo, your company logo and a description of what you do or what your organisation does. It could also display your contact information.

2. What’s Happening?
Type in your tweets using this box.

3. Main area
Here are all the tweets of the people you follow arranged with the most recent at the top of the page.

4. Main Menu
You can view and alter your profile using this menu as well as change your user name, and search for people you know.

5. Following/Followers
These two numbers show you how many people you are following and how many others are following you. To see a profile picture and a description of them just click on the words and a list will be displayed in the main window.

6. Lists
Using a list allows you to group together people who you follow on Twitter so that you can view only their tweets. For example all the people who write about the subject of motor racing are in a list and by clicking on the list name only their tweets appear in the main window. Other people can include you in their lists and you can view all lists you create or are included in by clicking the ‘Lists’ link.

7. Home
Clicking here will refresh the main screen and show you the latest tweets from those you follow.

8. @username
Click on this heading to see all the tweets where your user name is mentioned.

9. Direct messages
If you want to privately message someone then click here and your message will not appear on the main time line.

10. Favourites
If someone sends you a tweet that you’d like to save then click the little star icon on the left of the tweet text on the time line and it will be saved in your favourites, click this link to view them all.

11. Retweets
When you rebroadcast someone else’s tweet add an ‘RT’ to the front and include their user name with the ‘@’ symbol at the front. Any of your tweets that are rebroadcast will be displayed under this heading, as are those retweets you make and retweets made by people you follow.

12. Search
Type in a name or any other search term to find tweets that contain that term.

Linking up
The most popular use for Twitter comes about when it is combined with your website or blog. Whenever you write a
blog post or update your website or e-commerce store you can promote it to your twitter followers by including a web link in your tweet to encourage them to visit your blog or website.

Using web links
Long web links really eat into your character limit when making a tweet so use a specialist link shortening website to help you cram more into each tweet. (Try www.Tinyurl.com or www.bit.ly). These sites allow you to past in a long web link which it will then shorten for you. Simply copy and paste the shortened link into your tweet.

Automatic updates
Facebook and Linked-in can now be set up automatically to update from your Twitter status. Most social and business networking websites have a gadget that allows you to set this up. Once your Twitter account updates all your social or business networking profiles it means that you only have to type in your links and promotions once for them to be rebroadcast to all the people you have connections with, however they keep in touch with you.

There is also code that you can use to include a twitter feed on your website or blog. This code fetches and displays your tweets so that they can be seen by visitors to your website or blog without them needing to visit the Twitter site at all.

Facebook Fan Pages
These are an extension to the personal profile that you can build in Facebook and are useful for business because they
have space for galleries of photographs, useful for portfolios of work or to show pictures of your office and how to find it. There is also a place for your address and opening hours, customers can write on your wall with testimonials or you can place special offers, news stories and events on there to keep your ‘fans’ interested.

Create Design Studio have covered Facebook Fan Pages in this blogpost.

If you would like to use social networking sites to promote your organisation please call Create Design Studio on 01962 737989 and we can help you set up your website or blog and create profiles using social networking websites as well as guiding you on linking them together effectively.

This is for those WordPress users that host their blogs on their own domains.

We have had a few of these to sort for clients over the last few months.

The problems affect the admin area of the blog and have occurred when pages are updated or edited. We have also seen cases where you cannot view the lists of pages or posts from within the admin area.

Plugins seem to cause most of these issues, so the solution is to deactivate ALL your plugins and then re-activate them one by one, but testing your blog each time you activate another plugin.

You should find that when you reach the problem plugin the error returns. At this point there seems to be only 2 solutions, if you are using the most up to date verison of the plugin, replace it with another or just live without it.

In some cases we have found that more than one plugin has caused the problem.

If you need help please contact David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 or david@createdesignstudio.co.uk

There are three really important Meta Tags that will help get your website found by search engines: the Meta Page Title, Keywords and the Meta Description.

The Meta Page Title appears in the bar at the top of a browser window, in the case of Microsoft Explorer it is the text that appears immediately before the wording in the blue bar that says Microsoft Explorer. Most search engines place a lot of importance on this title when ranking web pages, so you should ensure that you have a unique title for each web page and that it contains your top search phrase for that page.

The Meta Description, is as it sounds, a description of what that particular web page is about. It is also the text that many search engines use to describe the web page in their search results. Again this is an important Tag that can help get the website found. Like the Title Tag most search engines do read these descriptions and place a lot of importance on them.

Meta Descriptions should also be written with real people in mind, as a well-written Meta Description can attract people to click on that site when faced with dozens of listings on a results page, even if it is listed towards the bottom of the page.

The Keyword Tag started life as the place to put all the phrases that you wanted your website to be found by, however many website owners found that they could out smart the search engines using them, most search engines no longer pay much attention to them. However some do use them and most will check to see if they have been included, so it is important to include them.

Keep in touch with your customers and promote your website at the same time
Any correspondence that you send from your organisation to a customer can also promote your website. Think about printing on your envelopes, having printed headed letter paper, printing your website address onto your invoices, comp slips, flyers and anything else you post out. Also have an email signature with your website address on it, these can be updated easily so you can always promote whatever you are doing online to any clients you communicate with via email. If you hand out any promotional items like pens, postcards or notepads then have these printed with your website address in addition to your logo.

Create Design Studio offer a range of new media marketing services, and we have years of experience designing and building websites and blogs, speak to our MD, David Woodroofe on 01962 737989.